Sponsors (5)
Official title: To comprehensively combat child marriage in the United States.
Introduced July 16, 2026 by Gwendolynne S. Moore · Last progress July 16, 2026
The bill strengthens protections for minors and survivors through a federal minimum marriage age, research, and targeted service funding, but does so at the cost of added administrative burdens, modest funding, privacy risks, potential family separations in immigration cases, and uneven effects across states and territories.
Children and survivors: establishes 18 as the federal minimum marriage age (and lets people married as minors petition to void those marriages), reducing forced/underage marriages and giving survivors legal recourse.
Survivors and at‑risk minors: creates and directs funding/incentives and victim-service programs (grant increases, state program support) to improve services, prevention, and coordinated responses.
Research and transparency: mandates federal and state studies, GAO/state data collection, and periodic reports to Congress and agencies to document child marriage prevalence, immigrant spouse cases, and gaps in services and law.
Immigrant families: could deny or delay immigration benefits for people who married as minors (including some spouses of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents), risking family separation and longer reunification timelines.
Administrative burden and legal uncertainty: adds interviews, reporting, task forces, commission duties, and agency compliance obligations that increase workload for USCIS, DOJ, state agencies, and courts and may slow processing or spur litigation.
Privacy risks: collecting individual‑level and evidentiary data (age, sex, marriage details, adjudicator notes) for reports and state databases could expose sensitive information about minors and survivors, especially in small communities.
Based on analysis of 10 sections of legislative text.
Raises age-related limits on marriage-based immigration benefits, creates a federal commission and GAO reporting, funds state task forces and DOJ incentives, bans federal facilitation of child marriages, and directs a model state law.
Restricts marriage-based immigration benefits so that U.S. citizens must have been adults (generally 18+) when they married or when they petitioned to sponsor a spouse or fiancé(e), and establishes a statutory definition of “noncitizen.” It also creates a federal commission and GAO reporting requirements, funds state task forces and competitive grants to study and respond to child marriage where states permit under‑18 marriage, increases certain DOJ formula grant awards for states that prohibit under‑18 marriage, bans use of federal property to facilitate marriages involving minors, and directs DOJ to draft a model state statute to prohibit child marriage and allow voiding of past child marriages.